American Eagle Outfitters and Shopkick, the most widely used real-world shopping app, announced plans to launch shopBeacon in 100 top-performing American Eagle Outfitters and Aerie stores across the country. Shopkick's shopBeacon is the first Apple iBeacon-based presence signal for retailers. When this trial goes live next month, it is anticipated to be the most widely deployed trial in the nation.
"AEO has always been an early adopter of cutting edge technology, which is why we are partnering with Shopkick once again, in order to provide our customers with the best mobile shopping experience available today," said Joe Megibow, Senior Vice President of Omni-Channel eCommerce at American Eagle Outfitters.
"Shopkick first launched its app in our Times Square flagship store. Now with shopBeacon, we can deliver a plug and play solution that works to personalize our customers' shopping experience in an impactful and powerful way."
As shoppers enter an American Eagle Outfitters store, shopBeacon will welcome and show them location-specific rewards, deals, discounts and product recommendations – without them even having to remember to open the app.
It can also tie at-home browsing behavior to in-store benefits; if the customer "likes" a specific product online, if they so choose, shopBeacon can remind them where in the American Eagle Outfitters store that product is sold. Even better, in the future, it can also deliver department-specific offers throughout the store – so must-have skinnies show up at the most useful time: in the jeans department.
"American Eagle Outfitters' shoppers are tech-savvy, social and love their smartphones," said Cyriac Roeding, CEO and Co-Founder of shopkick. "shopBeacon is able to connect to this new generation of shoppers as a trusted companion, by reminding opted-in users to open the shopkick app at the entrance of the store, and further personalize their shopping experience with alerts and high-value rewards. It is helpful and fun for both the shopper and the store."
American Eagle Outfitters is the first partner to deploy shopBeacon to 100 locations across the country, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Boston, and San Francisco, chosen based on high-level traction with shopkick.
By working with the 100 stores that have the highest traffic across the U.S., this trial is designed to deliver the most data and learning on how consumers enjoy shopBeacon. These stores join Macy's installations in its San Francisco and New York flagship stores, which went live just before Black Friday 2013, and were the first live installations of any iBeacon/BLE technology at any large retailer worldwide.
To install shopBeacon, a retailer simply sticks the device on a wall or other flat surface. Each shopBeacon has a battery life of five years. The shopkick software developer kit (SDK) also makes it easy to customize and further personalize the ways brands and retailers interact with shoppers through their own store apps using shopBeacon.
Equally important, shopkick has built sophisticated proprietary technology on top of the iBeacon protocol into its shopBeacon, to make the scalability, security and location accuracy possible that are required for a commercially feasible retail solution.
Shopkick delivers high-value rewards, in a currency called "kicks," to shoppers for a variety of actions they take as they go about shopping: being present in stores, browsing and interacting with products, and purchasing at participating retail stores as well as right within the app. Shoppers can redeem kicks to treat themselves with store gift cards, a free coffee or dinner, handbags, song downloads, movie tickets, donations to charity and more.
